The Bloomberg Recruiter Repo

Skills Companies Want But Ca

Business schools are supposed to produce graduates who have the a
need most. But corporate recruiters say some highly sought-after skil
among newly minted MBAs. As part of our ranking of 122 top bus
Bloomberg surveyed 1,320 job recruiters at more than 600 compani
skills employers want but can’t find—and which B-schools are best a
of the market.

The skills gap

 Strategic thinking
Creative problem-solving
Leadership skills
stry-related work experience

Adaptability
Communication skills

Initiative/risk-taking

Decision making

Analytical thinking
Global mindset
Ability to work collaboratively
Quantitative
Entrepreneurship skills
Motivation/Drive

These schools are hitting the sweet spot

The recruiters also scored MBA programs on their success at turning out graduates with the
most sought-after skills.
 Pick an industry: Consulting

Most-wanted and hardest-to-find

skills
Top schools graduating MBAs with
those skills

Creative problem-solving
1 MIT (Sloan)
2 Stanford
3 Harvard
Strategic thinking
1 Harvard
2 Pennsylvania (Wharton)
3 Virginia (Darden)
Communication skills Why are some lists shorter than others? For
1 London school to be matched with a skill here, it had t
be scored by a minimum of eight recruiters in
2 Harvard that industry who have experience with the
3 Western (Ivey) school’s graduates.

How schools stack up

Among recruiters, some schools are considered strong at teaching certain skills.

Pick a skill: Ability to work collaboratively Order by: Rank /

Alphabetical
 Western (Ivey)
Maryland (Smith)
UC Irvine (Merage)
Rice (Jones)
ESADE
th Carolina State (Jenkins)
IMD
UNC (Kenan-Flagler)
Boston Coll. (Carroll)
Vanderbilt (Owen)
Virginia (Darden)
Queen's
Michigan State (Broad)
Boston Univ.
Toronto (Rotman)
Wisconsin
Dartmouth (Tuck)
UT Austin (McCombs)
Southern Methodist (Cox)
Hult
Duke (Fuqua)
Northwestern (Kellogg)
Notre Dame (Mendoza)
Arizona (Eller)
Stanford
Minnesota (Carlson)
HKUST
Brigham Young (Marriott)
ashington at St. Louis (Olin)
Rochester (Simon)
UC Berkeley (Haas)
UCLA (Anderson)
Iowa (Tippie)
Cambridge (Judge)
McGill (Desautels)
CEIBS
London
Washington (Foster)
 Penn State (Smeal)
Carnegie Mellon (Tepper)
Michigan (Ross)
Indiana (Kelley)
USC (Marshall)
George Washington
Baylor (Hankamer)
Cornell (Johnson)
Georgia Tech (Scheller)
Yale
MIT (Sloan)
Purdue (Krannert)
IE
Texas A&M (Mays)
INSEAD
NYU (Stern)
Georgetown (McDonough)
Texas Christian (Neeley)
Emory (Goizueta)
Arizona State (W.P. Carey)
IESE
Columbia
Chicago (Booth)
Pennsylvania (Wharton)
York (Schulich)
Thunderbird
Ohio State (Fisher)
Harvard
HEC

Each school, in depth

Recent or prospective MBAs may want to spend some time here. Pick an industry and school
see how recruiters rate the skills of B-school graduates.
 Pick a school: Carnegie Mellon (Tepper) Pick an
industry: All

school all schools average

Leadership skills
Analytical thinking
Creative problem-solving
Strategic thinking
Communication skills

Methodology
The source of the data in this report is Bloomberg's Employer Survey, which was conduc
part of our 2014 Full-Time MBA Rankings. The survey was conducted in partnership w
Cambria Consulting from July to September 2014.

1,320 614 23
recruiters who hire MBAs total companies S&P 500 companies
as part of their job
 12.2% 9.5%
Technology Consumer Products
17.6%
Consulting

7.9% 5.8%
Manufacturing Energy

3.2% 2.7% 2.1%

5.2% Pharmaceuticals Edu/Govt/
Retail
Nonprofit
Health Care
17.5%
Financial Services 3.0% 2.0%
Chemicals 1.7%
Media /
Telecoms
Advertising
3.6%
Other
2.9% 1.4% 1.2%
Transportation
Real Estate Hospitality

To qualify to take our survey, respondents had to have recent MBA recruiting experience. We asked 122 M
programs that participated in our 2014 Full-Time MBA Rankings to name people involved in recruiting their
students in the last two years and to provide their e-mail addresses. Eligible respondents were both HR
professionals and non-HR professionals who recruit for specific roles. This process yielded a pool of 8,358
recruiters at 4,931 companies.

We sent the survey to all 8,358 individuals identified by schools. Respondents were also encouraged to nom
colleagues involved in MBA recruiting to take the survey. Our final respondent pool comprised 1,320 recruit
from 614 employers—1,263 nominated by schools, 57 referred by colleagues.

In our survey, we asked recruiters to pick from a list of 14 qualities the five qualities that are most important
when hiring MBAs, and the five that are hardest to find when recruiting MBAs. We also asked them to ident
10 schools at which they had significant recruiting experience in the last five years.

We then asked recruiters to rate, on a scale of one to five, how well these schools' graduates performed on
specific qualities important to them when they recruit MBAs. These scores comprise the findings in this rep

We define "sweet spots" as the skills that the largest numbers of recruiters within each industry listed as bo
highly desired and hard to find.

Finally, a note about alumni: It is common for MBA alumni to take up the task of recruiting from their alma m
their employer. However, alumni tended to rate their own school significantly more favorably than non-alum
that school; while some schools in our rankings had many alumni in the employer survey, others had zero. T
correct for this imbalance, we excluded alumni ratings from this report.

SOURCE: Bloomberg
 
Reported & written by: Francesca Levy and Jonathan Rodkin
Graphics: Christopher Cannon, Jeremy Scott Diamond, Adam Pearce, and Blacki Migliozzi